Lost Already
by jedi of ennth
Summary: All souls fall into the void between worlds. Lady Revan fears hers is too far gone to be retrieved. PostKotOR vignette.


_**A/N: **_Originally posted under the title _A Knight's Tale_ on another site. Written for a challenge on said site.

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She came from the sky, and that's what we called her; she approved with a wry smile and became one of our own.

Her attempts to speak our language were comically rough, heavy with her cumbersome, otherworldly accent, but she made herself understood. She was a traveler, she told us, on a journey to find something she could not remember. Her sea-blue eyes laughed when she said this, as though mocking her insistence on following a dream, but if we pressed her on the matter, she became sad and spoke no more.

Skye took up residence with the Mother of Medicine, on the outskirts of our colony, and the Mother reassured us of her pure intentions and strange powers.

"She is far beyond us," the Mother would say. "But she means no harm."

Not everyone was welcoming; as it has always been and will always be, a faction within the village was afraid of the unknown. They condemned Skye for her heavy, night-black armor with its trappings of war and claimed the machine-beast she arrived in was the demon e'Dhra's chariot.

But the demon e'Dhra never healed as Skye did. When villagers grew ill, she made them well again, and we no longer doubted her compassion.

"You are no demon," I told her one evening, as we watched the children play in the dusty central square.

Skye's lips twitched in a mysterious smile. "So sure?" she rasped.

The gentle taunt sank into my heart and made me wonder, not for the first time, what star she had fallen from.

-----

When the blushing clouds faded into the stars, Mother lit the bonfire in the village square, and the children gathered around to hear the nightly songs and stories. They always begged Skye to share her stories of adventure, and she always refused; instead, she sat among them and listened to the Mother's mythical tales with shining eyes.

Like the young ones, I wanted to hear of Skye's adventures, but I was patient and respected her silence. Perhaps we were not ready to hear. She spoke sometimes of a multitude of worlds like ours, and I confess this was beyond the scope of my imagination. I was made for this world; she was made for the thousands beyond it.

She was as confused by our way of life as we were by hers; her eyes were wondering when she helped us weave our clothing or assemble our houses of crude adobe. And yet she looked at ease among the children around the fire—perhaps because she was just as curious as they were.

"I reach a twisting in path," she told us, when we asked her why she stayed so long in our village on our primitive world; her sorrow was more eloquent than her words. "What I search, I … know not how to say," she apologized. "Where I go, I know not how to walk."

"If you will stay, we will have you," the Mother offered.

"Cannot," was her wistful reply. "Cannot stay. Cannot go home."

"And yet you cannot go forward," I pointed out gently. "I do not pretend to know how you swim the stars, but I would not like to lose myself in that void."

She looked at me, and I saw the void reflected in her eyes, filling her soul with emptiness. "I am lost already."

-----

Skye did not find what she was looking for in our village, on our little alien world, but eventually she found the next step in her journey and announced that it was time for her to depart. Before she set out for her machine-beast in the wilderness, she joined us in the courtyard one more time—only this time, as we gathered around the fire, I noticed she stood in the Mother's place at the front of the assembling crowd.

She caught my eye and beckoned me to her side. "I speak tonight," she informed me. "You please tell them how I mean."

I nodded, eager to hear and honored that she had chosen me to voice her thoughts to the rest of the village.

Skye began to speak as the stars came out. She was wearing her armor for the first time in months, and the firelight sparkled off its metal buckles and snaps. She whispered her broken sentences to me, and I restructured them until they built a bridge of prose between the traveler and her audience.

She said that her powers were not unique to her; she came from a land where many had the ability to heal and destroy in miraculous fashion—they were called Jedi Knights, and their powers were known simply as the Force.

Skye had been one of them until an enemy invaded and threatened to tear her worlds-wide village apart. She explained that she chose to fight the invaders against her elders' advice; this choice cost her everything she treasured, and brought her nothing but blood.

She spoke of a man—_Malak_, and the foreign word was bitter on my tongue—her not-quite-mate, who followed her to war and spilled blood at her side. He was strong, she said, and loyal, and he gave up his soul because she did.

"All souls fall into the void," she whispered to me; it was one sentence I did not rework before I passed it on.

Skye then told of her descent into madness—she knew the realm of e'Dhra well, and it was not a place she intended to revisit. She spoke with regret of how the darkness tore her dreams apart. What started out as a quest to set things right became a quest for vengeance and destruction.

"Everything … twisted," she murmured. Corrupted, she and Malak fought among themselves, until one day the momentum of her power brought about her downfall. Malak betrayed her, and the order of Jedi she had turned from took her prisoner.

But they did not make her answer for her crimes as we would. They did a thing so cruel, so terrible, that the words tumbled out of Skye's mouth on a tide of anger as she spoke of it.

The Jedi made her someone new. They took her memories, her essence, yes, even her name, and replaced them with a lie she came to believe.

"They called me Skye," she said, and suddenly I understood why she had smiled so strangely when we began to call her that.

We did not know what to make of her confession to this point; it was all so fantastical, a thing out of our ancestors' myths, that some did not believe her. Some simply came to fear her again, slinking away from the courtyard before Skye's words could upset their worldview even more.

Skye saw them leave, but she continued to speak. She told of how she relearned her powers—as Skye, the woman the Jedi had made her—and dedicated herself to destroying Malak.

She spoke softly of a man she met in her pursuit of justice, and suddenly there were tears in her eyes. He was her _home_, and yet she could not return to him—not yet.

Her tale wound on as she described finding Malak again; he ripped away the veil of deceit the Jedi had placed over her eyes, and she discovered that her true self was a monster, a scar, a being with bloodied hands.

"I am lost, still," she said simply. "But I hope to find myself."

She returned to the past, then, and told of her final battle with Malak. Fury and chaos, shattered trust and regret came together as the two opponents danced on the edge of life and death. Skye's audience leaned forward, spellbound, and I had to consciously remind myself to relay her words to the crowd.

In the end, Skye had triumphed, destroying the man she had turned into a monster. Those who had rejected her, the Jedi, welcomed her back into their arms, but she rejected their warm reception and set off on her own, through the stars, until she came to our neglected world.

"Why do you travel? What do you seek?" a young voice cried from the crowd, breaking the awed silence that followed the end of Skye's story.

Skye shook her head chidingly.

"It is for her to know," I told the child, when she could not get the phrasing right, "and for you to guess at." Despite her playful words, I suspected she herself still guessed at her path.

-----

I was the only villager to follow her out to her machine-beast, and we walked in silence under the night sky. I understood even better than before why she could not stay.

"I wish you luck in your journey," I whispered when we came to the mouth of her chariot. "I hope you find the answers you are searching for."

"Thank you." She looked up into the sky she had fallen from, and then her eyes locked with mine. That mysterious smile lit her face, and the last words she whispered into my primitive sphere of existence were an introduction, not a good-bye.

"My name is Revan."


End file.
